The latest and greatest version of the free, open source GNU/Linux operating system Ubuntu has been released just minutes ago. If you’re tiring of Windows, or simply want to have a look at what all the fuss is about, give it a whirl. Find out more at www.ubuntu.com. You can even run it from the CD, so there’s no need to erase your Windows XP install.

My girlfriend and I both have iPods. I have a 2nd gen shuffle, she has a 2nd gen nano. Both were working fine on my Edgy install, however, the 2nd gen nano wasn’t being ‘found’ by Gnome, and therefore not appearing in Banshee (which is what I really wanted). There is a workaround, it’s a replacement for Gnome’s HAL. Simply follow the instructions here for results: http://www.tigert.com/archives/2007/01/09/ipod-and-ubuntu-edgy/

A relatively unknown bit of virtualisation software called ‘virtualbox’ from InnoTek has recently become open source’d. I’m actually quite surprised it hasn’t received more publicity. After hearing people rave about virtualbox in #hantslug on the blitzed irc network, I thought I’d give it a whirl. Setup was far easier and much more sane than vmware player/server, all configured via nice gui rather than weird perl script. The best bit was yet to follow…the performance.

Finally, a decent flash player for linux! Woohoo! I’m not sure whether it will be much of an improvement on the beta (that didn’t crash once for me), but all the same, it was about time a long time ago. Check it out: Penguin SWF

After wasting many hours messing around with VoIP solutions, I’ve finally decided that Tesco Internet Phone is the way to go. There’s a few good reasons why I think this, it’s easy for anyone to obtain and install. This was one of the main factors in my decision. With Tesco Internet phone, you don’t have to open ports on your router, it comes with a USB handset, so no need to get one of those, and you can just pop down to tesco and pick one up for really cheap (£15 I think) WITH a £5 calling credit thing.

I recently stumbled upon a really interesting site called Quickones which has a series of screencasts on how to use various things in Ubuntu (among other distributions). For example, there’s a short guide on how to get flash to work on Ubuntu. Alan Pope delivers a very well paced and easy to follow screen cast. These screencasts are highly recommended to newcomers to the Ubuntu Linux distribution.

John Hunt.com has recently undergone a server upgrade, so things should be a bit quicker now at my expense! Enjoy.

Linking and byte-compiling packages for runtime python2.5... pycentral: pycentral rtinstall: installed runtime python2.5 not found pycentral rtinstall: installed runtime python2.5 not found dpkg: error processing python2.5-minimal (--configure): subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 1 dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of python2.5: python2.5 depends on python2.5-minimal (= 2.5-3); however: Package python2.5-minimal is not configured yet. dpkg: error processing python2.5 (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured Errors were encountered while processing: python2.

This was written haphazardly in a forum, please take it as-is (or as a rant of some kind)! Ok, so before I started using cake I went in to the #cakephp channel on freenode and asked: “yes, but what about when my application gets really complicated?” “don’t worry, it’s totally flexible” “I love cake” “etc..” I was still skeptical, but we had a small project coming up at work and a fair bit of time to do it in.

Unfortunately, Ubuntu (Edgy and previous versions of Ubuntu) doesn’t seem to have a handy little script called mount.fuse which should come with the fuse-utils package. This basically means it’s impossible to get Ubuntu to mount sshfs mounts upon startup (nicely), or using a nice and simple mount command like: mount /my/sshfs/mount/point/ Anyway, personally, I find it really annoying. Yes, there are probably good reasons why they don’t include the script, but no I don’t care.